ARTICLEWeaponizing Affect: A Film Phenomenology
of 3D Military Training Simulations During the Iraq WarD. Andy Rice
University of California, Los Angeles
andyrice@ucla.edu

Figure 1. One of three camera operators records a
training simulation at the Fort Irwin National Training Center in 2012
(left). Simultaneously, a technician in a media center nearby (right)
records video streams for later review by soldier trainees. He also
follows a director’s commands to emit smells, broadcast sounds, and
ignite small explosions as the scenario unfolds. Recorded by the
author, with permission from Fort Irwin National Training Center. The US military has long envisioned the Mojave Desert, two hours
east of Los Angeles, as the ideal place for simulating otherness. This
Rhode Island–sized swath of desert, site of the army’s Fort Irwin
National Training Center (NTC), has served as a sort of screen upon
which the army projects the image of its enemy—a uniquely
three-dimensional “film body,” to adapt the term of film
phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack (1992)—in response to particular
historical circumstances across time. The iterative nature of these
changes resembles an affect system, a concept named by American
behavioral psychoanalyst Silvan Tomkins (2008) to describe a living
being’s mechanism for adaptation and survival in response to shifts in
mood, circumstance, and feeling. Before the United States entered World
War II, Fort Irwin served as the training grounds for General George
Patton’s tank battalions. During the Cold War, the US Army simulated
battles here across dozens of miles of desert against the
“Krasnovians,”—the name given to a US regiment that replicated the
tactics and armaments of Soviet land forces—in preparation for tank
warfare against the Russians on the plains of Germany. After the fall
of the Soviet Union in 1989, the army vacillated among an amorphous
amalgam of potential foes that happened to have purchased Russian
weaponry, including the “Hamchuks” (North Korea) and “Atlanticans”
(Cuba), before settling on the “Sumerians,” who represented the Iraqi
Republican Guard (John Wagstaffe, personal communication, 15 April
2007).

In the midst of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2003,
however, the US military overhauled its “force on force” training
paradigm to emphasize counterinsurgency and “cultural terrain.”1 “Despite
the fact that cultural knowledge has not traditionally been a priority
within the Department of Defense (DOD),” argued Montgomery McFate, a
trained cultural anthropologist who became a key architect of the
military’s turn to culture, “the ongoing insurgency in Iraq has served
as a wake-up call to the military that adversary culture matters”
(McFate, 2005, p. 43). The army introduced “cultural awareness
training” to a new manual in 2004 that was guided by the “warrior
ethos,” meant to instill in each soldier the autonomy and quick
thinking capacities needed to negotiate the uncertainties of urban,
insurgent warfare on behalf of US interests (US Dept. of the Army &
US Marine Corps, 2007). In response, the NTC disbanded the Sumarians
and constructed thirteen mock Iraqi and Afghan villages that simulated
locations, social conditions, and everyday life practices. These sites
came to serve as the final training grounds for American soldiers
before they deployed to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. For two
weeks, the army and contracted special-effects technicians and scenario
writers from the Hollywood film industry orchestrated simulated
improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, suicide bombings,
beheadings, sectarian infighting, protests, raids, and sweeps for 4,000
soldiers finalizing their preparations for deployment. Army forts and
Marine bases across the country began to build such simulation sites,
all hiring Arabic-speaking Iraqi-American actors (and later Pashto- and
Dari-speaking Afghan-Americans) to play mayors, villagers, police
chiefs, mothers, aid workers, and so on to enhance the cultural realism
of their scenarios (Wagstaffe, personal communication, 15 April 2007).
In effect, a staged, embodied enactment of support for America’s
invasion of their native countries was extracted from these subjects.

Rather than expanding upon the obvious irony of this scenario, I
examine the complex experiences afforded by the site simulations among
these civilian subjects, as well as the troops in training, the mix of
military and civilian staff members who manage the sets, and the media
and academic visitors (including me) who have documented the Fort Irwin
simulations. I contend that when the army began to operate embodied
training simulations focused on cultural awareness and
counterinsurgency, it was almost “hardwired” to adapt old instincts for
domination and control to this new, intersubjective context, raising a
series of questions about culture, learning, and critique. What do
troops learn about culture and cultural exchange through a “cultural
awareness” training regime that still treats “the enemy” as embodied
subjects? How do different role players make sense of their experiences
in the training simulations in relation to their prior life
experiences, and what meaningful patterns emerge from their accounts?
And why would the public-affairs office in this fort welcome—and even
cultivate—visits from journalists, television news reporters, artists,
and documentary filmmakers to assess “worst-case-scenario”
training that on the surface makes visceral the failure of US military
policy in Iraq and Afghanistan?

In many journalistic accounts, scholarly studies, and documentaries
about the fort, somewhat incredibly, the spectacular display of
violence, blood, chaos, and bodies serves as evidence of progress
rather than failure within the military in the wake of Abu Ghraib (see Gerber
& Moss, 2008; Filkins & Burns, 2006; Magelssen,
2009).2
“I sensed a genuine desire on the part of Army and Iraqi staff to make
things right,” concluded one performance-studies scholar after spending
a day immersed in rehearsals of IED attacks at the fort (Magelssen,
2009, p. 68). My analysis, however, is not an endorsement of the
training. I reject the conclusion that such manifestations of “cultural
awareness” in simulation training demonstrate that the US military is
becoming a progressive institution. Rather, I propose below that the
manufacture of media fascination and positive reporting is part of the
simulation’s design—and is significant to the survival of this
particular fort. Finding new ways to cooperate with reporters on
military-friendly terms is in keeping with strategies since Vietnam for
controlling journalism about US wars (Stahl, 2010).3 In the context of
pervasive cameras in the United States and abroad, the military’s
vision of a future of endless small-scale urban warfare against
insurgent enemies facing poverty and environmental collapse,4 the routines of
torture in secret military prisons, the rise of “militainment” news and
video games, and the pervasive use of drone strikes that kill
civilians, I argue that it is imperative to see the military’s
experiments with managing affects in immersive, cinematic simulation
performances as a new kind of weapon executing old ends, and not a new
iteration of clean, “virtuous war,” in the ironic phrase of
military-simulation scholar James der Derian (2009).

At its center, this is an article about the cinematic mechanics
entailed in weaponizing affect. Like the “shock and awe” campaign in
miniature, the war-movie “cultural awareness” spectacles at Fort Irwin
are intended to disorient and soften those immersed within them—troops
and visiting journalist-filmmakers alike—so that they are primed for
official explanations on hand to account for “the real” of their
intense affective sensations. Central to my account is Kara Keeling’s
(2007) theory of cinematic clichés, which she argues can be
internalized and projected upon the world as “common sense” filters for
perception and attention. At Fort Irwin, the cliché of the stoic,
masculine action-film protagonist who must harden himself to sadness
and grief also centers troop learning priorities and teaching methods,
limits the range of soldiers’ encounters with Iraqi and Afghan role
players, and offers a familiar schema for visiting
journalist-filmmakers to follow in their own documentary stories.
Action-cinematic narratives in the movies and simulation-training
scenarios alike typically end before the aftermath of urgent action,
short-circuiting the need to process suffering, remorse, and loss. In
addition to their supposed role in simulating “adversary culture” and
facilitating troop learning, in other words, cinematic techniques also
serve a military public-relations strategy to mitigate dissenting
journalism and subvert critique amid disastrous wars.

Film phenomenology with
cameras and the simulation body

Cameras and performance have played a key role in war
campaigns, dating to Matthew Brady’s photographs of corpses on
battlefields arranged before his lens during the American Civil War,5but the Iraq War featured an unusually wide array of camera operators
who created photographs, moving images, and spectacles to be
photographed for very different ends. Photographs of atrocities have
not necessarily communicated dissent or moral indignation. Below I
offer an account of how the visual records of bloody, violent displays
at Fort Irwin have in fact undermined possibilities for their use in
critique. I draw on film theorists of affect and intersubjectivity
(Cartwright, 2008, 2011; Keeling, 2007; Laine, 2007; Marks, 2000, 2002;
Sobchack, 1992, 2004) to think through the centrality of
cinema-industry tropes in the construction of the training simulations
and the porous boundaries between action-film depictions of war and the
subjective perceptions of participants in the training simulations as
to the real and the fake of their experiences. Laine argues that the
orientation of the cinema viewer to the screen epitomizes the
ephemeral, yet continually reconstitutes space “where the ‘outside’ of
the collective experience becomes the ‘inside’ of the subject’s psychic
life” (Laine, 2007, p. 10). My research on Fort Irwin suggests that
many young soldiers who have not yet gone to war have internalized
these cinematic “outsides” and have drawn from their viewing
experiences as a basis from which to judge the affective realism of
their military training. In this light, the cinema is not exactly an
ideological apparatus of mechanical reproduction or an illusion machine
playing on insatiable unconscious desires, but rather “a matter of
affects,” in Laine’s terms, that drives those in charge of Fort Irwin
to conform the landscape to their trainees’ common-sense orientation to
the world (Laine, 2007, p. 10; Keeling, 2007). I intend to emphasize,
however, that it is not just soldiers who understand war imagery
primarily from the clichés of entertainment cinema.
My analytical approach draws from the film phenomenological method
pioneered by Sobchack, who adapted the insights of French
phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962) to the study of cinema.
Across years of writing in the film phenomenological mode, Sobchack
came to treat her own flesh as a kind of recording device in the midst
of watching a film, partly as a materialist critique of the nihilistic
writing on simulation by theorists following Jean Baudrillard (1994).6Sobchack
kept track of the sensations she experienced while viewing cinematic
material for later, more considered structural analysis of genre and
film form. While Sobchack writes from the position of a viewer in a
cinema theater, however, I write from my experience as a cameraperson
in the midst of a three-dimensional, cinematic, war simulation space
inhabited by various actors. I visited Fort Irwin in 2007 and 2012 to
document and observe training simulations. I return to my footage here
to help recall events that I might otherwise have forgotten, failed to
notice, or needed to analyze further, but also to reflect on the
performativity of being a
documentary cameraperson in the context of this intersubjectively
produced simulation experience. I embodied the “variable” of the
visiting journalist-documentary filmmaker, a cinematic trope that the
simulation scenario seemed well prepared to manage.

I situate my phenomenological analysis in a historical study of 250
news reports written about the fort over a period of roughly twenty
years (1989 to 2012),7 as well as three articles published in performance studies journals and a feature-length documentary film titled Full Battle Rattle
(2008). Like Suchman (2016), I thought about this digital archive as a
field site. These stories illuminated patterns in narratives about
military training at the fort and revealed shortcomings—or perhaps
intended effects—in my thinking about the up-close experiences of
intensely graphic simulation scenarios that had played out before my
camera, which were then immediately interpreted for me by military
personnel serving as my guides. In this way, my approach differs from
previous scholarly treatments that have focused exclusively on up-close
ethnographic observation of performance in relation to official
military policies. I also analyze interviews I conducted with a former
soldier who rotated twice through Fort Irwin and with a white Barstow
resident who donned a burqa to play an Afghan woman to draw out key
points about affect and realism in the simulations.

In the tack and yaw between phenomenological description of camerawork
and archival-historical analysis, I have come to frame Fort Irwin as a
kind of “simulation body” with an affect system, akin to Sobchack’s
(1992) notion of the “film body.” Merleau-Ponty grounded his
understanding of experience in the human body’s capacities to perceive
stimuli and express intention, qualities that Sobchack ascribed to the
“film body” that emerged in the space between a film and a viewer in
the midst of a screening. Likewise, what I am calling the “simulation
body” denotes a spatially distributed system that perceives stimuli and
expresses intention in the midst of performance, here in performances
that change slightly over time to keep the fort relevant and funded.
The human bodies, communications networks, scenario scripts, vehicles,
mock towns, and so on constitute so many variables for the simulation
body to manage toward the aims of its own economic, political, and
cultural reproduction. I consider the traces left by the simulation
itself across time in the archive of film and journalistic reports, the
desert landscape in the transition from force-on-force combat to
counterinsurgency war, and accounts of participants who have passed
through simulation training as indicative of the ongoing development of
this particular affect system. To sharpen the implications for my
central point here, I treat the journalist-documentarian as a variable
to be controlled by various other elements within the distributed
simulation body, not as an observer to be more or less ignored. The
simulation itself, in other words, always-already accounts for the
journalist-documentarian who attempts a neutral evaluation of training
simulations.

Though it is unbounded by skin, the simulation body, I claim
here, consistently executes an affective strategy centered on avoidance
and mystification of the feared object, here “the enemy” that the
military constructs, defeats, and then augments across time like an
endless and increasingly elaborate action scene. Suchman (2016), citing
Judith Butler, refers to the figure of the enemy in US
military-training simulations as a limitation to cultural awareness:
“The intelligibility of the body includes always its ‘constitutive
outside,’ those unthinkable and unlivable bodies ‘that do not matter in
the same way,’” she observes (p. 8). In the military, the two terms for
“those unthinkable and unlivable bodies” are “enemy” and “civilian,”
with the former category figured as threatening and immoral and the
latter as antithetical to the disciplined, hypercapable,
action-oriented soldier body. This institutional hubris is in tension
with the fact that the US military remains somewhat accountable to
civilian oversight, which can constitute an existential
threat—especially during a messy counterinsurgency war rife with
mistakes and scandals, like Abu Ghraib. Public-relations strategies
since Vietnam have aimed to lead US civilians to identify with US
soldiers and the activity of soldiering, as opposed to the civilians
and enemy combatants they have killed (Stahl, 2010). Part of this
strategy has entailed attempts to control journalism, which I tether
below to my account of stories about Fort Irwin. The simulations serve
as training for troops about to deploy, but they also seem to function
as a quickly recognizable, close-to-home, “good enough” story for
visiting US writers and filmmakers who cannot or would rather not
undertake the hard, expensive, controversial, and dangerous accounting
needed to really assess the efficacy of such methods in Iraq and
Afghanistan. This is a devil’s bargain. Starting from my phenomenology
of documentary camerawork at Fort Irwin below, I come to suggest a more
general problem for documentary practice and reportage in the context
of simulation, one with particularly urgent stakes in times of war.

“Stitch Lane” 2007

“Turn the camera off,” the army sergeant tells me. Several unscripted
flames are searching for unconsumed materiel on the driver’s side of a
mangled charcoal Humvee spattered with red stains. This army officer,
known at Fort Irwin as a tactical controller (TC),8is
about to veer from standard protocol to fix the problem. The TC grabs a
plastic container filled with fake blood and uses it to douse the fire
as twelve other TCs, a Fort Irwin public-relations guide, and several
members of the media look on. Satisfied, the TC politely informs me
that I can resume videotaping. Smoke continues to billow into the air
from three canisters hidden behind the wheels of the “bombed”
Humvee—canisters designed for use in scenes like this one.

We are at the closest training site to the public-affairs office at
Fort Irwin NTC: Medina Wasl, a mock Iraqi village comprised of thirteen
cargo containers fashioned with faux siding to resemble homes in rural
Iraq, as well as a mosque, a pen with goats, and a market, all aligned
along a central dirt road. The Humvee serves as the focal point of the
most often observed and practiced training simulation here, dubbed
“Stitch Lane” by the army. The simulation depicts the aftermath of an
IED attack—complete with $60,000 “SimMan” medical dummies dressed with
bloody lacerations and scattered across the street, Iraqi villagers
wailing over an injured family of three in a black sedan struck by
shrapnel from the explosion, and a confused army private stumbling
through this scene, alternately calling for a medic and his mother.
Troop trainees must “stitch” and evacuate the wounded quickly and
safely.

My shock at being immersed in the dimensionality and chaos of this
environment blends with a perverse sense of fascination, familiarity,
and even comfort at the resemblance it bears to a Hollywood action-film
set. I wind my way through this action-film documentary with a video
camera of my own, both impressed and confused by my access to the
damning scene as an early-stage graduate student. Troops in training
are tasked with quickly securing the area around the blast, assessing
injuries to soldiers and civilians, stopping massive bleeding while
warding off insurgent sniper attacks and car bombs, and evacuating the
injured to a secure forward operating base set up in the desert several
miles from the village. During their two weeks at Fort Irwin, troops
practice this scenario three to four times, with TCs observing their
performance and stage-managing insurgent attacks based on the soldiers’
failures to follow proper procedures. TCs try to “kill” all the new
troops in early renditions of this exercise should they take more than
ten minutes to carry out the evacuation. All participants in the
simulation wear MILES laser-tag vests, which perceive signals emitted
from guns or roadside bombs that approximate the ballistics and
physical trajectories of actual weapons. When a suicide bomber
detonates within close proximity of the American soldiers, a TC with a
“God Gun,” a light blue physics calculator fashioned after a handgun,
“shoots” each casualty to assess the extent of their simulated injury
or death. This time a suicide bomber drives a truck through an
unprotected alley to the scene and detonates, killing all the soldiers
and civilians.

At the end of a simulation, the troops gather in a communal space in
front of a television screen—the central courtyard of the village
“mosque”—as a TC shows video of their performance and leads a
discussion about how to improve the next time. The emphasis here is on
procedure (how to secure the perimeter of the IED site, identify
wounds, apply a tourniquet efficiently, load bodies into the medevac
truck, and so on), but unspoken is the development of positive
affective sentiments among the soldiers who learn together. The
soldiers bond through this ritual before a mainstay of domestic
architecture, the television, which functions not as a window on
reality but as a mediator of their relations with one another. Video
viewing in this spatial arrangement is a historical practice and form
of expressive experience they all share. Performance before cameras is
vital to their mission as the executors of empire in an age of
ubiquitous media, as the scandal of Abu Ghraib ironically suggests.

The significance of performing affective qualities before the camera is
exemplified later, when the army arranges for two particularly
charismatic and friendly Iraqi-American actors to sit with me for
interviews. They say that they try to play a role in “saving lives” in
their native and adopted countries by teaching young American soldiers
about the cultural nuances they will encounter once in theater. “Sam,”
a Chaldean Christian liquor store owner from San Diego who immigrated
to the United States in the 1970s and last visited Iraq in 1986, states
that “this is reality, we’re not playing games with it. We’re using
real Iraqis”:

We act like them, we get mad like
them, we yell out just like the Iraqis, we tell them get the hell out
of my country, ’cause you’re not helping—we do everything just like in
Iraq ’cause they should know. That’s what they’re gonna face. I talk to
lieutenants who have been in Iraq already when they come here. They
say, hey, flashback. This is the same. We give them the
same thing. (“Sam,” personal communication, 8 April 2007)9

I later discover that he has conducted more than fifty interviews for
the press. He also appears in many photos on a wall at the
public-affairs office, including one with President George W. Bush. I
see this wall on the day I am leaving the fort and pan my camcorder
across the photographs of other journalists who have passed through
this place, labeled by name and institutional affiliation: Market Road
Productions, Australian TV, a Berlin newspaper, Armed Forces Info
Services, Christian Broadcasting Network, Danish National TV, History
Channel Modern Marvels, Deutsche Welle Television, French Radio, State
Dept. Press Tour, Sacramento TV, the BBC, and dozens of others. Six to
twelve media institutions visit for every rotation, the public-affairs
officer tells me. “Then they go on my wall of shame,” he quips. I am
surprised when he points out the newest image, a photograph he had
taken of me, unaware, the day before. He tells me that keeping
photographs on the walls helps him remember all the people he has met,
and he reiterates again how much he likes journalists. I like him, too.
He has told me many good stories today about the history of the fort,
his own life as a military reporter, the Iraqi-American actors he has
met, and the pedagogical aim of all the simulation scenarios that we
watched together. But as I leave the office and begin the thirty-mile
drive through the desert between Fort Irwin and Barstow, I cannot shake
the thought that all of us media visitors hang there like so many
hunting trophies.
Being trapped in the “desert of the real,” as Baudrillard (1994) had
thought to call the social condition of the United States while driving
through this same Mojave Desert, is a confusing sensation (p. 1). It is
not clear, after all, that visions of chaotic violence, civilian death,
and physical destruction like those I had just documented should
function to promote a war effort. Noor Behram’s haunting forensic
photographs of the rubble and innocent victims of US drone bombings in
Pakistan, for instance, testify to the ongoing significance of
documentary representation of atrocity for raising awareness,
indignation, and momentum for protest. “I want to show taxpayers in the
Western world what their tax money is doing to people in another part
of the world,” he explains (Ackerman, 2011). The US military, applying
similar ideas about the power of documentary images to opposite ends,
has pressured journalists in Iraq not to publish graphic photographs of
the actual dead.10But
at Fort Irwin, the explicit depiction of violent events that the army
treats as emblematic of actuality and predictive of future
experience—gory, bloody, and merciless throughout—in fact seems to
short-circuit energy for dissent and anger in the near term: my own and
that of the other journalists on the “wall of shame.”

Over months of reflection, I come to understand the scenes of violence
at Fort Irwin, the accounts of Iraqi-American actors, and the
public-affairs officers’ explanations, which seemed to anticipate my
strong affective responses, as aligned with incremental policy changes
dating to the 1960s designed to control depictions of American wars and
suppress dissent. Stahl (2010), for instance, argues that the rise of
military-industrial-entertainment collaborations since the Vietnam War,
and especially since the early 2000s, co-opts war imagery for
pleasurable, interactive “militainment” products and military
recruiting. Economic pressures on news organizations wrought by the
rise of cable and twenty-four-hour news channels incentivizes media to
produce low-budget talk shows and relay the stories of Pentagon
public-relations personnel over independent reporting. Publishing
graphic war photographs could endanger ongoing access to these
officials, so most news organizations did not. The unfortunate result
has been the ceding of war imagery almost entirely to the entertainment
industry, where images of killing and the killed tend to drive action
and plot rather than reflection on suffering. Narrative films about
masculine war heroes who successfully solve problems through violence
and first person shooter games “invite one to project oneself into the
action,” in Stahl’s phrase (2010, p. 3). Building on such trends, Fort
Irwin produces immersive environments designed to arouse strong
affective responses from participants, including those of
journalist-documentarians. The codes of action-entertainment
cinema—complete with reductive depictions of the culture of the
Other—are then deployed to define interpretations of graphic violence.
In other contexts or historical moments, such scenes might have served
to discredit a war effort or show a lack of cultural knowledge. But
here and now, the circulation of intense affect functions as an
evolving weapon—one calibrated, as I explore below, by narrative cinema
techniques.

Awareness of cinematic culture

A film spectator may comment about the experience of
seeing a film as believable or convincing without articulating the
assumptions from which this sense of the real emerged, sometimes even
in the full awareness that their sense of this reality directly
contradicts social facts.11In
the context of “Stitch Lane,” participants’ experiences of realism play
on broadly shared understandings of Hollywood action tropes for
manufacturing drama, affect, and audience investment, even if—or
perhaps especially because—the immersive scenario references war events
that spectators and participants alike imagine to have had mortal
corollaries in Iraq or Afghanistan in the recent past. In this light,
the drama of the simulation scenario affectively stitches together the
trauma of the IED explosion as an actual world phenomenon, the
narrativization of such events through Hollywood techniques, and the
training of anxious troops in the present who know movies but not war
for the contingencies of a future that may bring actual wounds. These
three sutured temporalities function to solidify bonds of camaraderie
in troops who must confront the specter of bodily harm through
performances in which they stand at once as subjects and objects for
their fellow performers, including Iraqi and Afghan role players. All
function simultaneously as subjects and objects of the cinematic
realism operational in the simulation, a style of realism vested in the
visualization of the wound above all.

Embedding such visualizations within narratives affects soldiers and
actors, as I show below, but also visiting observers to the fort, like
me. How are we new arrivals to make sense of a training spectacle
designed to overwhelm the senses? Military spokespersons stand at the
ready to offer explanations for the shocks: Train like you fight;
inoculate against stress; weed out the bad-apple troops who might kill
civilians; teach troops cultural awareness so they don’t misunderstand
gestures, expressions, and gender norms; and so on. Over time, Medina
Wasl became not just a site for training soldiers, but also a showpiece
for the army’s new, public-relations-oriented framing of itself as a
progressive cultural institution in the midst of insurgent war. This
has been an effective strategy.

In articles about the training simulations at Fort Irwin, invocations
of realism are both pervasive and ambiguous in ways that are
instructive about what cultural awareness might mean here. Descriptions
in reports and comments from military interviewees typically identify
landscape, climate, the presence of Arabic-speaking Iraqi bodies, and
the occasional inducement of traumatic symptoms in trainees to signify
realism. Across the transition from “force-on-force” to “cultural
awareness” training, stories about the fort increasingly focused on the
journalists’ sensory experiences of being present to the simulations.
Their narratives read like a cross between phenomenological description
and Hollywood script: “Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop! BOOM!” wrote one.
“Toomer popped off a round—and then his gun jammed, at the worst
possible time, just like in the movies” (Thevenot, 2004). A New York Times
feature published in 2006 likewise connected the action-cinematic ethos
at the fort to realism, authoritatively demonstrated in this account by
soldiers’ embodied responses to their new training regimen:

With actors and stuntmen on loan
from Hollywood, American generals have recast the training ground at
Fort Irwin so effectively as a simulation of conditions in Iraq and
Afghanistan over the past 20 months that some soldiers have left with
battle fatigue and others have had their orders for deployment to the
war zones canceled. In at least one case, a soldier’s career was ended
for unnecessarily “killing” civilians. (Filkins & Burns, 2006, p. 1)

The figure of the soldier who “unnecessarily” kills civilians
plays an important part in this particular story and many others—a
peculiarity worth analyzing. I interpret two meanings to the recurrence
of this figure. First, it implies the narrative of the progressive
army, monitoring its troops for “bad apples” who may misrepresent US
interests in theater by committing atrocities. The army will not deploy
a soldier who demonstrates an unnerving lack of calm in the midst of a
simulation. This narrative bears little relation to the pre-2007 policy
of not counting killed civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, judging from
reports that I address below. Second, and more to the point, in the
news story the soldier who kills civilians functions as evidence
for this visiting journalist that the cultural-awareness training
simulations are working properly. The public-affairs officer at the
fort tells the reporter that the simulations are so realistic that they
have induced “battle fatigue” and killing sprees to prove that the training approximates an intense war experience. The reporter then conveys this juicy information to readers.

Somehow, across the institutional transition from “force-on-force”
training to “cultural awareness,” the figure of the puking,
pathological, traumatized soldier body remained the index of
functionality in journalistic evaluations of military training, though
as an index for different modalities of troop suffering. Quotations
from senior officers offer rationales for extreme training of this sort
that shift over time away from environmental conditions and toward
culture. In 2004, when the US Army still emphasized force-on-force
training, Brigadier General Robert Cone of Fort Irwin stated:

We want our commanders to say that
it’s harder at the National Training Center than in war. . . . We put
them in a tent where it’s 100 degrees, there’s dirt in their computers
and they haven’t had a shower for a week and see how they function. We
want to put them under stress and see how they cope. (Santschi, 2004)

Cone emphasized the realism of the training in terms of the soldier’s
bodily response to the harsh desert conditions, but he did not mention
culture as part of this environment. Four years later, comments from
Fort Irwin commanding officer General Dana Pittard emphasize sensations
of alterity (which we may hesitate to characterize as culture) over the
physical environment: “The kind of towns, the urban towns we’re
creating, the signs, it must hit all five of your senses. You must see
Iraq and Afghanistan. You must smell it. You must touch it” (Rather,
2008). A feature published in 2007 affirmed that this kind of affective
realism was key to the new regime of cultural-awareness military
training—and to writing about such training. “‘It’s realistic to the
point where soldiers pass out, throw up, turn white and start shaking,’
said Sgt. Mark Ramsey, an Iraq War veteran and Hollywood stuntman who
helps plan the training mission” (Vargo, 2007). Ramsey was referring to
the sensations of fear and shock that troops experienced amid referents
to the sensorial environment of Iraq and surprise insurgent attacks,
not simply the heat of the desert. “You’ve got to train like you fight”
(Vargo, 2007). The way to ensure the survival of the simulation body
economically and institutionally, ironically, hinged on its capacities
to create images that could induce in its human components the affects
associated with looming death. Strong affect grounded the approach to
teaching at the fort.

Strong Affect

An ex-Marine Corps noncommissioned officer, “Greg,” who rotated through
Fort Irwin on two different occasions while on active duty, reflected
in an interview with me that the training he received overwhelmingly
intended to make soldiers fearful, suspicious, and on edge. “The
commanders want to instill a certain fear in you to keep you sharp, to
keep you edged, to keep you ready,” Greg explained. Pedagogy emphasizes
that no procedure or action carried out by troops deserves a
commander’s positive praise. “Bottom line is that it’s just never going
to be good enough, no matter what,” Greg said. “Their reward system is
through negativity. . . . I didn’t realize that until I stepped out of
the military and got into this profession, fitness, which is more about
positivity” (“Greg,” personal communication, 3 February 2012). He
recalled one incident in particular in which a janitor rolled an IED in
a trashcan into a room of soldiers undetected, a simulation meant to
reenact an IED attack that had killed a number of marines in a mess
hall in Iraq the week before. “It was an eye opener for everybody. It
was like, I don’t think we’re ready for this. It’s an intangible kind
of thing, a fear . . . almost like a feeling where you just want to
tuck up in a cave and hide,” he reflected (“Greg,” personal
communication, 3 February 2012). When this simulation event occurred at
Fort Irwin, it indexed a specific moment of the recent past, while also
suggesting an emergent strategy being deployed by insurgents that would
likely impact this unit of marines deploying to Iraq soon. The
relatively brief duration of time between the actual IED explosion in
the mess hall in Iraq and its simulation at Fort Irwin was key to its
affective power for this group of marines. This was a reenactment of
current news and a training
simulation simultaneously. In this context, the bodies of these marines
in training touched something of the bodies of those who had died in
the bomb attack affectively, if not literally. It could have been them.
Greg’s response, “I don’t think we’re ready for this,” was perhaps the
desired pedagogical outcome of the bomb simulation. One can never be
vigilant enough.

The visible evidence of stress, fear, and disgust at Fort Irwin were
made central to claims about improving the survival rates of soldiers.
Such images suggest to visitors and evaluators that the fort can
habituate soldiers to the intense affects of war, thus limiting the
power of affective response to gore and fear that can impede judgment
in actual battle. The Fort Irwin simulation body must also anticipate
war scenarios of the future, or at the least make a case that their
training paradigm remains relevant in times of peace. Images at Fort
Irwin thus have a dual aim, a dual purpose in relation to the fort’s
survival. By coincidence, Tomkins (2008) in fact names the aims of
consciousness within the affect system as Image
(p.10). The aggregate of sensory, memory, and affective imagery
processed through consciousness comprises the organism’s Image, its
understanding of purpose and direction.

Spokespersons for the army—stewards of the institutional Image—argue
that simulations like “Stitch Lane” and the one Greg described above
“inoculate [soldiers] against stress” and thus allow them to function
more effectively in scenarios where lives may be at stake (a conceit of
this training that I examine at length below) (Lavell, 2003). It is
also the case that phenomena that arouse intense affects, particularly
those that routinely defy explanation and trigger fear, force those who
experience them to undertake particular coping strategies, to search
out explanations for feelings of humiliation and contempt. In Tomkins’s
affect system, this is one way to theorize the recursive relationship
between affect and consciousness. The subject produced by repeated
exposures to humiliation and contempt, in Tomkins’s description,
resembles the archetypal action hero as well as the military’s avowed
ideal of the good soldier, “learn[ing] to have contempt for those who
surrender too easily and to avoid defeat at any cost lest he suffer
self-contempt” (Tomkins, 2008, p. 481). Tomkins suggested that there is
a monopolistic tendency in the affects of contempt and humiliation if
they are not confronted, assuaged, or worked through. Repeated
experiences of these negative affects produce in the subject what
Tomkins calls a “strong affect theory” that serves as the foundation of
ideological thinking: “It is the repeated and apparently uncontrollable
spread of the experience of negative affect which prompts the
increasing strength of the ideo-affective organization which we have
called a strong affect theory” (Tomkins, 2008, p. 460).

“Strong theories” about how the world works harden over time into what
Eve Sedgwick, building on ideas of Sigmund Freud (2001) and Melanie
Klein (1946), calls the “paranoid position” (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 123).
This corresponds most closely with the principle of avoiding negative
affect, the defining strategy of military training and defensive
infrastructure. Avoidance strategies inevitably cut the subject off
from a range of encounters with potentially shaming, humiliating, or
misunderstood objects that have in the past overwhelmed the psyche, and
so further mystify the objects. This leads a strong theory position to
claim more and more objects as applicable within its purview over time,
because power to control affective experience is defined increasingly
by avoidance. It seeks almost automatically to expand its power through
boundary marking, and this can be contagious with others who follow a
similar affective strategy of avoidance that is not counterbalanced by
positive affective experience, like fellow soldiers forced to endure
drill and then threat. Moreover, positive affect can actually come
about in the process of working to counter the negative affect by
avoidance or anger, as was the case with the soldiers’ staging of
photos at Abu Ghraib. In these cases, ironically, the object associated
with the strong affect theory of avoidance becomes central as well to
the experience of a restrained positive affect. Total and complete
destruction of the source of negative affect leaves a kind of vacuum at
the center of affective life.

We might ask after the implications of avoidance in relation to images
that tend to arouse negative affects. Keeling (2007) argues that
cinematic structures extend outside the theater once they are
internalized by spectators and turned on the world itself. Those who
regard what they encounter through the logic and needs of cinematic
structures become “living images,” their perceptual world an extension
of theatrical experiences as well as a reflection of the world on
screen (p. 25). Keeling points to the example of the Black Panther
Party, whose members appeared in public with guns in the late 1960s as
a part of a strategy to draw television cameras to their new defiant,
revolutionary image of blackness. While Keeling praises the way this
gesture challenged dominant schemas for understanding the image of
blackness, she notes that this action also reproduced the reductive
cinematic cliché that “it takes masculine tactics to effect political
change”—a staple trope of Hollywood action films that troubled female
Panthers in subsequent years (p. 79). In many cases, for Keeling,
projecting cinematic perception onto the media-saturated world outside
the theater is a short-term survival strategy always in danger of
reproducing the logic of capitalism over time. New ideas are folded
into dominant notions of common sense.

Materializations of cinematic affect accumulate upon the land in places
like Fort Irwin. Cinematic structures here homogenize processes of
identification and becoming for the ends of military capital, “even to
make that violation feel good,” in Keeling’s terms (p. 25). Certainly
for soldiers, the strong negative affects of training reinforce
boundaries between “us and them” and work against the notion of
openness in intercultural exchange one might think to be central to
cultural awareness engagements. Performance scholar Zack Whitman Gill
(2009) argues that this kind of training in fact reinforces a “martial
heterotopia” defined by a “warrior ethos” parallel to but set apart
from (and above) civilian life:

While an Army soldier demonstrates
the qualities that comprise the Seven Core Values [loyalty, duty,
respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage], a
civilian is constructed as the opposite. Every moment of a recruit’s
existence in the Army affirms this absolute difference, through a
series of performances that immediately and visually discard the lax
and disorganized lifestyle of the civilian. (p. 144)

Gill’s analysis of the training at Fort Irwin as a permanent rehearsal,
detached from and contemptuous of civilian life at home and abroad,
would seem to dovetail well with Keeling’s theory about the projection
of cinematic common sense and Tomkins’s writing on strong affect
theory. Military scripting does not produce a value-neutral simulation
in which participants can envision future scenarios by tweaking
abstract variables. This is a simulation, rather, that intends to
encode through cinematic techniques a set of values and presuppositions
into its human variables for
an ideological outcome. Whereas Sobchack likens cinematic consciousness
to plastic surgery (“We have all had our eyes done,” she quips), the
Fort Irwin simulation body aims to colonize the sensory-affective
organization of individuals within its space. And visiting journalists
and filmmakers who follow the norms of neutral reportage are easily
subsumed as variables within this system, time and again moved by the
affective force of witnessing simulation scenarios and interviewing
soldiers to then reproduce as “consciousness” the military-friendly
explanations on hand.

Critique of affective realism

Bonnie Docherty, a researcher at Human Rights Watch who specializes in
questions of disarmament and limiting civilian casualties during war,
published the most detailed study of the training simulations and their
relation to the practices of soldiers once deployed in theater. Her
account “More Sweat…Less Blood”
(2007) throws into question the recourse to affective realism in
public-relations material and news reports about the efficacy of
training at the fort. Docherty positions herself as a spokesperson for
improving military training to reduce civilian casualties, and was
allowed unusually extensive access to the fort and its personnel. She
visited the fort three times over the course of four years of research
and pored through 40,000 pages of training manuals and documents about
army lessons learned (pp. 5-6). In line with the reports of other
visitors, Docherty emphasizes the importance of realism in her study,
but she found it lacking at Fort Irwin. The towns were too small and
the Iraqi role players too few to simulate the sense of threat that
they engendered for troops once deployed (p. 4). She says it was a
problem that only American soldiers stationed at Fort Irwin play the
insurgents, as soldier trainees quickly learn to distinguish between
Arabic speakers who play cultural roles and “insurgents,” none of whom
speak Arabic (p. 6). The simulation scenarios themselves were not
varied enough in intensity or goals. Encounters with Iraqi role players
were still minimal (p. 7). And the rules of engagement taught and
practiced at Fort Irwin did not always overlap with international
humanitarian law, in her estimation. She insists that “troops must
receive reviews that consider not only military success but also
civilian casualties,” a factor not evaluated in army engagements in
Iraq until September 2007, four and a half years after the start of the
war (p. 4). While Docherty quotes veterans who experienced flashbacks
to their combat experience in the midst of participating in
simulations, she avers from accepting these comments as evidence of the
kind of realism she deems most important to cultural-awareness
training. “The different views of NTC’s realism are in part
attributable to whether or not a trainee had been to Iraq,” she
observes. Her field research corroborates the views of one battalion
commander she interviewed, who said that “those who had not been in
theater were ‘relatively unfazed [by the realism]. [To them, i]t’s a
training exercise’” (p. 20). She concludes that the realism advertised
by the military as its training product, and relayed by most visiting
journalists and filmmakers in their representations of the simulations,
remains elusive. “The new trainees’ lack of reaction is disconcerting
since NTC’s role is to awaken them to what lies ahead,” she concludes
(p. 20).

John Wagstaffe, the public-relations officer at Fort Irwin before 2011,
reflects on the dilemma the army faces in getting the attention of its
young trainees. “If it’s not on video,” Wagstaffe says, “then it didn’t
happen” (John Wagstaffe, personal communication, 11 July 2011).
Wagstaffe explains that for a generation of recruits who grew up
playing video games and watching war films, the baseline standard of
assaultive sounds, smells, and actions that could induce the sensation
of affective realism—the stated key to pedagogy at Fort Irwin—is
extreme. This problem is partly of the military’s own making. In
military-sponsored video game series like America’s Army, Call of Duty, and HALO,
recruiting depots set up in public schools, advertisements aired during
sports broadcasts, Hollywood action movies endorsed by the military
like G.I. Joe (2009) and Ironman (2008)
(González, 2010, p. 16), and the controversial “Army Experience Center”
opened in a Philadelphia shopping mall (Cousineau, 2011, p. 519),12 extreme,
graphically depicted, reactive violence predominantly functions as a
form of exciting entertainment. Offering gaming experiences as part of
the Army brand, in addition to suggesting that army life might lead to
such adventures, aids recruiting within the army’s key demographic of
poor, frustrated young men. It is also an ethos at odds with the notion
of cultural awareness. As one sergeant noted in unnerving frustration
in the midst of the transition to cultural awareness in 2004, “You
train a guy to kill, and then you tell him to go hand out water and not
to shoot anybody unless he’s shot at” (Thevenot, 2004). Within this
context, it is not surprising that some of the soldiers view the
embodied training simulations as just another drill to endure.
Moreover, and perhaps more to the point, commanders’ assumptions about
such preexisting attitudes lead them to develop “worst-case scenario”
simulations, to perform simulated gore and violence that exceed what
soldier trainees would likely see in combat. To achieve the affective
realism that would open the space for soldiers to feel the consequences
of their actions and the possibilities for their own deaths, in other
words, would mean creating scenarios that were not representative of their future lives.

It is worth saying a bit more about the kinds of realism claimed as
operational at the fort and the problems that these claims pose for
evaluation by outsider journalists and filmmakers. Visitors have no way
to judge whether or not this kind of training is effective at reducing
civilian casualties, facilitating cultural exchange, or saving the
lives of American soldiers during deployment. Beyond this, the
evaluators who most matter, Iraqis and Afghans living through wars who
must deal with the distant presence of American troops in their home
countries, are not available for comment about the realism of military
training. Instead, Iraqi-Americans who mostly left the country in the
1970s; soldier trainees who have not deployed but have played video
games; and veteran soldiers whose traumatic experiences of war lead
them to experience flashbacks in the midst of much more mundane,
everyday sensations stand as authorities on realism in reports and
films about the fort. While these participants may be well intentioned
and open, they are also following orders. They manage procedural
realism: the reality of written military codes about how to move down a
narrow street as a unit, perform guard duty, inspect cars at
checkpoints, and “kick down doors,” to use the phrase of one army
mechanic. While these concerns are practical and relevant to the
everyday activities of soldiers, and useful to see and improve upon
through the use of video, they have little to do with Iraqi or Afghan
culture.

Figure 2. Video stills of the “Wounded
Private” (left) and Afghan role players (right) acting in the Stitch
Lane training simulation, 2012. Recorded by the author with permission
from Fort Irwin National Training Center, Barstow, CA.What is significant here is the relation between the affective
experiences induced by the simulation scenarios and the official
interpretations on hand to account for them. Military spokespersons use
the term “culture” to describe differences in customs, belief, and
behavior that troops will encounter in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in
practice the sensory experiences of otherness produced in the
simulations are very much about the conjuncture of army and cinema
customs, beliefs, and behaviors. Viewers and participants who have not
been exposed to graphic depictions of violence tend to have more
pronounced visceral responses to the training simulations. One
middle-aged white woman from the nearby town of Barstow, whom I will
call Jane, accepted a job as a part-time role player at Fort Irwin
around 2008. I interviewed her in 2012. In rotations of troops who were
destined for Afghanistan, she wore a burqa and played the second wife
of a rural Muslim Afghan man (his actual wife, Jane’s actual friend,
played his first Muslim wife in the simulation). Though Jane knew very
little about Afghanistan or Muslim culture, the army allowed her and
other local American women to play these roles because, according to
script, they said nothing in public, remained anonymous beneath the
burqas, and simply followed their husbands (“Jane,” personal
communication, 15 February 2012). Arabic- and Pashto-speaking role
players are more expensive to contract, so as many roles as possible
are played by enlisted army members and local civilians who need
part-time work. As a result, role players like Jane enter the
simulations with a very different set of experiences of war imagery and
expectations about war representations than most army trainees. Jane
recalls seeing for the first time one of the amputees who played a bomb
victim in the Stitch Lane simulation (Figure 2). “To me it was so
realistic that I just started crying,” she says:

He was yelling where was his leg,
and the next thing I know I’m just crying because I’m wondering where
his leg’s at. Just sitting there, and you’re like, oh my god, it’s how
they must feel when they’re out there and they lose their leg. . . . My
dad didn’t really let me watch war movies, so my first time out here, I
didn’t know we had amputees, so I cried a lot my first rotation. They
made me stay over there because I really was. . . . I was devastated. I
don’t know a lot about war. So when I’d seen it, it was very scary.
(“Jane,” personal communication, 15 February 2012).

Jane says she gradually learned how to cope with the display of
violence and blood because she needed the job and because she accepted
her officers’ interpretation of what she had seen: Many soldiers had
lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it was crucially important that
they experience something of what these moments are like before
deploying. Here, again, the simulation body of the fort brought Jane’s
strong negative affective response into line with the position of the
overall military mission. Repeated exposure to simulations of traumatic
events—here an odd parallel to the logic in therapy for “prolonged
exposure” explored in Brandt (2016)—blunted Jane’s potentially
political, visceral reaction to the visage of the aftermath of an IED
attack as devastating, scary, and sad. By hardening herself to the
intense affects of fear and disgust that overwhelmed her at first, Jane
came to believe she could help soldiers better perform their jobs. “I
got to where I understand that the concept out here is to help
[American soldiers] come back alive,” Jane explains:

I have to learn to do it because
it’s my job. And so I waited a couple days and I came back, and the
more you come back and you see it, you see you’re helping soldiers.
They come in, and you know that hopefully what they learned while you
were here is going to bring them back alive. So that made me feel
really good about what had first freaked me out (“Jane,” personal
communication, 15 February 2012).

Jane’s reaction to the horror of seeing an amputee and her
subsequent acceptance of the military’s interpretation of its meaning,
mimic the logic at the center of many documentary and journalistic
interpretations of the training simulations.

Absent their own critical intervention, these reports convey a message
sympathetic to the military mission. In his article “Rehearsing the
‘Warrior Ethos,’ ‘Theatre Immersion,’ and the Simulation of Theatres of
War” (2009), for instance, performance theorist Scott Magelssen
foregrounds interviews and observations that he gleaned from his
one-day visit to the fort as representations of its reality as a
reformed, newly progressive vision of American military norms. While he
acknowledges that he saw nothing that the army did not want him to see,
he nonetheless judges the training simulation positively:

I sensed a genuine desire on the
part of Army and Iraqi staff to make things right by teaching the
troops about the changing face of the cultural and political landscape
in Iraq, and a deep resentment toward those who act poorly, as in the
case of the alleged Blackwater massacres. (Magelssen, 2009, p. 68)

Like the embedded reporters who “objectively” relate sympathetic
stories about humble and patriotic American soldiers on the ground in
Iraq, Magelssen in effect assumes what digital-media theorist Elizabeth
Losh has described as a pragmatic rhetorical stance. Losh ascribes this
position to critics of the US wars who nonetheless accept military
contracts to program virtual-reality training games like Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq
(Losh, 2006). These programmers argue that the games’ missions to teach
the Arabic language and Muslim culture and aid treatments of PTSD
respectively outweigh the fact that the military funds the games and
might misuse or reappropriate their work for other ends in the future.
While I appreciate the nuance of this position for the designers of
such programs and scholars who write about military affairs, it is not
the place from whence to evaluate training outcomes. Perhaps Magelssen
was intending to give pause to an audience of academics who would
regard military activity as a de facto negative component of collective
life in the United States, or perhaps he was acting out what he saw as
ethical ethnographic practice by affirming the legitimacy of the
pragmatic position of his Iraqi-American subjects. This is, indeed, the
dominant framework in journalistic accounts of the fort, and
Magelssen’s article offers a more detailed account than most from which
to draw such conclusions. But in focusing on the present of his visit
as opposed to the longer history of the fort itself or the potential
ramifications of the shift from conventional warfare to “cultural
awareness,” Magelssen overestimates the truth-value of his proximity to
the cinematic events and people he describes. He writes as though he
had not been a part of the show, and yet his conclusions uncannily
resemble the public-relations material that the military itself has
generated around these training simulations.

The same could be said about the nationally televised feature documentary about the Fort Irwin training simulations, Full Battle Rattle (2008)
by Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber. While the filmmakers state in material
about the film that they are against the war personally, and while it
is the most comprehensive treatment of the experiences of individuals
in the training simulations (soldiers and actors alike), it foregrounds
intimacy with subjects employed by the military, presence to simulated
performance events, and the stories of participants over structural
critique. Thus, while the style of the film retains faith in the camera
to communicate the phenomenological experience of fake war and all the
complexities the endeavor entails, it also by design
gives a great deal of control over the production of affect and the
interpretation of its political import to military spokespersons, who
orchestrate both for the participants in the simulation, the
filmmakers, and the spectators of the finished film. Absent a story
from the perspective of Iraqi civilians that follows soldier trainees
once they are deployed (a far more difficult, hazardous, and expensive
project to undertake), the filmmakers must acknowledge a measure of
complicity in the military campaign and its continuance, in spite of
their stated intentions to the contrary. As of 2012, the
public-relations office at Fort Irwin still showed the film in its
entirety to introduce the look, feel, and rationale of the simulations
to groups of tourists who visit the fort to see a live training
exercise.13

Conclusion: "Stitch Lane" 2012

Figure 3. Video stills of the staging ground
for the Stitch Lane training simulation, 2007 (top row) and 2012
(bottom row). The explosion that initiated the simulation in “Medina
Wasl” in 2007 can be seen in the top right frame; the explosion in this
same space, renamed “Ertebat Shar” by 2012, can be seen on the bottom
left. Recorded by the author with permission from Fort Irwin National
Training Center, Barstow, CA, 2007 and 2012.
Like the US economy as a whole, the Fort Irwin simulation body seems to
equate survival in an era of “cultural awareness” with growth. When I
return to the fort for a second visit, I am again taken to this
area—Medina Wasl, now reimagined as an Afghan village called Ertebat
Shar—to witness the performance of “Stitch Lane” from a press box above
the now-paved central street. The village has more than 200 structures
and has become by far the largest on the fort (Figure 3). Concrete
barricades line the street, and buildings feature more elaborately
detailed facades and awnings. Hooded men push carts of plastic toys and
melons through the street, occasionally followed by a figure in a burqa
or a goat. A statue stands in the center of the town, a replica of the
Princess of Hatra erected in 238 CE in the city of Al Hadr, Iraq, to
protect it from Persian invaders. Though the town is now meant to
simulate Afghanistan, the statue remains. Because the circumference of
the statue’s base and the concrete barricades that surround it prevent
anyone from standing too close, TCs and their contracted
pyrotechnicians can hide large gunpowder charges there and detonate
them safely, a sensory-story element they are loath to give up (Figure
4). A plaque at the base of the statue indicates that it was
constructed “in appreciation of the American Soldier, the true
protector of democracy” by Strategic Operations, a San Diego based
action/softcore-porn film-production company saved from near bankruptcy
following 9/11 by entering into the military simulation business.

Figure 4. Video stills of the “Princess of
Hatra” statue and placard, 2012. Recorded by the author with permission
from Fort Irwin National Training Center.
Supplying Iraqi role players, amputees, and pyrotechnics expertise to
the army became a cottage industry in Southern California during the
Iraq War years, when Strategic Operations grew around 60% per year
(Vizzo, 2011). In lieu of the medical dummies, civilian amputees adorn
latex suits that squirt fake blood from their missing limbs and play
soldiers who have just lost limbs in IED attacks. Professional army
videographers record the training events from three different angles
using large cameras with expensive zoom lenses. Their footage is
compiled, marked, and integrated for use in after-action reviews at a
communications center hidden in the village. Soldiers will watch
selections from the footage later at a newly built, climate-controlled
movie theater instead of the interior of a faux mosque. Two contract
employees monitor the feeds on a computer screen and cue the sounds of
gunfire, the call to prayer, livestock, screams, and so on at the
command of the lead TC. They can also release smells into the center of
the village, including burning flesh, “dragon’s breath,” coffee, roast
beef, jasmine, sewer, apple pie, gunpowder, and vomit (“Technician,”
personal communication, 15 February 2012). All the footage that they
record is sent wirelessly by way of microwave transmission to a larger
communications center and server on the post. Through a radio lavalier
I attach to the head TC, I hear stage directions before they unfold in
the town as the action begins. He conjures snipers out of myriad
windows, summons a suicide bomber to the center of the city street, and
directs insurgents to fire from their locked-down positions until they
are hit. “Give them a Hollywood ending,” he says to one. The insurgent
stands in a window and shoots as many of the American soldiers as he
can before the receptors on his laser-tag vest beep to indicate that he
has been killed. The duration of the firefight stretches on, nearing
forty-five minutes as a host of civilian tourists on an “NTC Box Tour”
look on with me from the covered platform. Confined to the space for
our own safety, it is as though we are pioneer spectators to a new form
of hypermasculine super-CinemaScope filmmaking.

Immersion in action-cinematic simulation, however, is a difficult
place from which to explore adversary culture or offer a critique of
military activities already visible within the simulation itself.
Indeed, media visitors to the NTC became a key variable within the
simulation and, over time, an asset. The public-affairs office at the
fort anticipated the norms of journalistic practice, the allure of
cinematic display, and the influence that their interpretations could
have on the stories their guests would tell about simulation training.
In the midst of shocking and disorienting simulations of “worst day
ever” scenarios, public-relations officers, TCs, and particularly
gregarious Iraqi- and Afghan-American actors offered quick, on-message
explanations of the need for such scenarios to save lives and the
virtues of the military’s new, culturally aware approach to warfare.
Reporters, scholars, and documentary filmmakers visiting the base have
reproduced both the phenomenological novelty of cinematic spectacle at
close proximity and the military’s explanation for these innovations as
emblematic of enlightened, virtuous warmaking, although they are
inappropriate indices for the efficacy of “cultural awareness” in
theater. This consistently reproduced result—one way in which the
military is weaponizing affect in an era of counterinsurgency
war—foregrounds a difficult dilemma for documentary practices in the
context of increasingly ubiquitous simulation technologies. The ethical
documentarist can be anticipated by the simulation and enfolded within
its logic. Cinematic performance is here a weapon that short-circuits
the oft-assumed power of documentary exposure to bring about social
change. Rather, the rules by which ethical documentary practitioners
play—faith in following subjects or foregrounding their statements over
voice-of-God narration, belief in proximity to subjects as a route to
truer representation, discerning organic narratives in subjects lives
to allow their nuanced characters to emerge—are easily subsumed into
this simulation body.

Notes1For an
incisive critique of the cultural turn in military training, including
a chapter on “cultural terrain,” see González, 2010.2To
foreshadow a point to which I return at length later in the article,
many of the reports and films I consider here position the cinematic
gore and violence in simulation training as tools for hardening troops
to the realities of battle, as well as reining in impulses to abuse
prisoners or kill civilians. The visage of Iraqi dress, décor,
and everyday activity serves in these stories to emphasize the
seriousness with which the military is taking culture in the midst of
chaos, a connection I will critique.3Stahl
(2010) identifies the formation of the all-volunteer army, official
press conference, embedded reporting scenario, and interactive
first-person presentation of troop experiences as entertainment as
parts of a sustained effort since the 1960s to blunt dissent, decouple
citizenship from soldiering, and create “large scale press integration
into a system of Pentagon public relations” (p. 23). Fort Irwin
welcoming reporters to observe training fits into Stahl’s critique of
“militainment,” and I touch on his larger argument below (Stahl, 2010,
pp. 15–16).

4Looking
back from the perspective of 2016, The
U.S. Army Field/Marine Corp Counterinsurgency Field Manual of
2008 articulates scenarios that have in many respects come to fruition
in the Middle East–North Africa region, among others. The manual
ruminates on the fact of 9/11, the failing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, and the specter of 2.8 billion young, jobless city
dwellers living in poverty throughout the globe by 2015, coping with
“overcrowding, pollution, uneven resource distribution, and poor
sanitation,” and ostensibly recognizing an allure in radical ideologies
that identify the United States as a key culprit. The introduction of
the manual predicts a long low-intensity war against an entity like the
Islamic State: “America is at war and should expect to remain fully
engaged for the next several decades in a persistent conflict against
an enemy dedicated to U.S. defeat as a nation and eradication as a
society” (US Dept. of the Army & Marine Corps, 2008, pp. viii,
1–2). However, there is little critical reflection here on the military
institutions that would benefit financially and politically by
reproducing such a state of affairs.

5For a consideration of the production process of
Brady’s photographs and its relationship to the industrialization of
war, see Trachtenberg, 1985.

6Baudrillard (1994) uses the term simulation
to describe a social condition in which the copy, instrumentalized
toward the ends of profit and empire, precedes the possibility of a
preexisting original. Sanitized of archaic, ritualistic, and mystical
qualities, these copies simply reproduce a normative code, stretching
lifeless in all directions and annihilating meaningful cultural and
political differences over time. He argues that the mechanically
reproducible photographic images that constitute movies, television,
and print advertising, especially since the 1960s, function to amplify
desires for the real while simultaneously cutting off possibilities for
engaging with a “profound reality” (p. 6). Baudrillard’s tendency to
write about bodily experience as a theoretical rather than a lived
phenomenon in the era of the image, however, has left him open to
feminist critiques like those of Sobchack (1992, 2004), who theorizes
materiality as enmeshed in idiosyncratic phenomenological experiences
of cinema and other everyday encounters rather than absent from them.

7 I relied
extensively on the NewsBank: Access World News database for news
stories about simulation training, which I accessed in July 2011 and
downloaded and analyzed in intervening years.

8When
I visited the fort in 2007, these trainers were called “operational
controllers.” In 2012, the army referred to them as “tactical
controllers.” To avoid confusion in this chapter, I refer to them
throughout as tactical controllers, but this is not necessarily the
case in other works about the fort created before 2011.

9The rhetorical emphasis on realism is ubiquitous in my interviews, a point to which I return in my analysis below.

10The case of
photojournalist Zoriah Miller, who published images of marines killed
in a suicide bombing in 2008, highlights the complexities entailed in
press access, representation of war, and embedded reporting.
Spokespersons for military units have embraced embedded reporters’
positive stories about the everyday lives of soldiers. However, they
claim that published photographs of Americans killed in action provide
their enemies with intelligence about the effectiveness of their
attacks, violate principles of informed consent, and offend soldiers’
families. Miller argues, conversely, that the images are vital to
communicate to American readers about the physical and emotional cost
of the war. The fact that his photographs shocked viewers when suicide
bombings happen every day, he concluded, “says that whatever [the
military is] doing to limit this type of photo getting out, it is
working.” Since the publication of the photographs, no military unit
has permitted Miller to embed. As war casualties increased, fewer US
units allowed embedded journalists to accompany them to battle sites
(Kamber & Arango, 2008).

11Ien Ang’s seminal reception study Watching Dallas (1985),
for instance, discusses the phenomenon of “psychological realism” in
relation to European fans’ responses to the American television soap
opera Dallas. Audience
members identified with the dilemmas of the show’s protagonists even
though they were aware that the degree of wealth and drama it portrayed
were not representative of American society on the whole.

12The $12
million center, which closed in July 2010, offered visitors 80 gaming
stations, helicopter and Humvee simulators, and a space for managing
enlistments. Located between an arcade and a skate park, the center
became a flashpoint for protesters troubled by the army’s endorsement
of graphic violence in first-person shooter games targeted at children.
See Cousineau, 2011, pp. 518-20.

13A
public-affairs officer communicated this information to me during my
visit to the fort in 2012. Every month, the army leads several “Box
Tours” for members of the public to see the “worst day ever” a soldier
might encounter in Afghanistan. The “show” very much resembles a
Hollywood war movie, as I suggest in the conclusion of this article.

Losh, L. (2006). The palace of memory: Virtual tourism and tours of duty in Tactical Iraqi and Virtual Iraq. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Game Research and Development (77–86). Perth, Australia.

United States Department of the Army & United States Marine Corps. (2007).
The US Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual: US Army field
manual no. 3–24: Marine Corps warfighting publication no. 3–33.5. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

BioD. Andy Rice is the ASPIRE
Fellow in Socially Engaged Media in the Division of Undergraduate
Education at UCLA. He earned his PhD in Communication from UCSD in
2013. He is a documentary filmmaker and media studies scholar whose
written work centers on social justice documentary production,
documentary film studies, phenomenology, and performance studies. He
has also produced/directed two feature-length documentary films, and
was the Co-Producer, Cinematographer, and Editor of a feature
documentary titled Spirits of Rebellion (2016), about the history of the black independent film movement known as the L.A. Rebellion